These are not the diagnoses you’re looking for!

I’ve been wound up recently by a letter, just one solitary utensil in the alphabet used by writers and speakers throughout the western world, sounds crazy but its true and that letter, that profane insipid little consonant is B.

Don’t get me wrong I am no fan of X or any of the weirdly unusable letters from scrabble but this isn’t about anything so minor or uninteresting as a game or even syntax I just hate the way it has somehow inculcated itself into everyone I meets diagnosis. Not just that but it seems to managed to make even the intelligentsia of psychiatry believe it is somehow ubiquitous and necessary when diagnosing personality disorder. BPD! that’s what I read and hear all the time, theres even a BPD awareness week and courses being run just to heighten awareness of BPD?

I mean pardon my ignorance on this but ICD has 8 listed personality disorders and DSM has 10 so where are all the others in the vernacular of these people or has there been a shift and all of us now just have Borderline? Its even more confusing when you consider that BPD is not a valid diagnosis in the UK, we come under ICD and they use the term Emotionally unstable but nowhere am I hearing EUPD so what the fuck is going on?

Its relatively common in groups to have to clarify this and I have started to get the impression that things have gone backwards recently as people even turn up asking if we’re the BPD group and seem perturbed when I explain its for all Personality disorders, as if they have a special one that needs a special group and its not their fault, no they are being given a clear impression that BPD is PD and anyone who says otherwise is probably just not that in the know.

Now I can put up with a small amount of ignorance, I have a mental health issue so it goes with the territory but I am becoming even more worried that the B isn’t the only piece of misinformation that is being espoused as fact. Apparently its also a female issue and therefore misogynistic in its use, as if saying women are being subjugated by the diagnosis. I have EUPD as one of my diagnoses and last time I looked I wasn’t a woman, indeed in every group we run there are men who are struggling in the same ways as the women. I could throw back an argument that Anti Social personality disorder is equally sexist but that would be trite at best and only spinning the stats in the same way to score a point.

The fact is that it is generally agreed that personality disorder is equally divided between men and women and the fact that some are more weighted towards either gender is a case of diagnostic laziness and misfortune than anything else, men are more likely to become known to services after an act of anti social behaviour and therefore get the ASPD diagnosis, that’s just an unfortunate incidental fact whereas many women will be known to services earlier in their prognosis and this means they are seen as less anti social and hence seen as Borderline, not that they are any less likely to be anti social just they haven’t presented because of it.

I’m not an expert and don’t want to change the world by informing people of their errors but if I hear another professional giving the term BPD just as a catch all I will be very hard pressed to withhold my anti social traits.